religions Article Problematising the Official Athens Mosque: Between Mere Place of Worship and 21st Century ‘Trojan Horse’ Christina Verousi * and Chris Allen School of Criminology, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: This article investigates the ‘problematisation’ of the recently inaugurated mosque in the city of Athens, the capital’s first ‘official’ mosque since the country was liberated from the Ottoman Empire almost two centuries ago. Building on and developing the existing scholarly literature on the problematisation of mosques in the contemporary European setting, this article generates new knowledge by focusing on the Greco-specific context of that same problematisation: an amalgam of history, geography, religion and culture, that asymmetrically shape and inform how and why the new Athens mosque is—and indeed continues to be—a site of conflict and opposition. Presenting new empirical data, this article uses an innovative and original approach to bring together two separate pieces of fieldwork undertaken first-hand by the authors in 2001/2 and 2019/20. Analysing the two sets of data, a threefold thematic structure is employed that focuses on Greece’s history, Christian Orthodoxy and global terrorism. This article first explores the existing scholarly canon relating to the contemporary problematisation of mosques through a focused overview of Greece’s history, religion and culture appropriate to mosques and in part, Muslims and Islam. From there it sets out the findings from the two periods of fieldwork to illustrate and evidence discourses of opposition towards Citation: Verousi, Christina, and the mosque and how these serve to function both symbolically and tangibly. Using the thematic Chris Allen. 2021. Problematising the analysis, theories relating to the ideological processes of Islamophobia are deployed to elucidate Official Athens Mosque: Between a better understanding of the Athens mosque. In doing so, this article makes a timely contribution. Mere Place of Worship and 21st Century ‘Trojan Horse’. Religions 12: 485. https://doi.org/10.3390/ Keywords: mosque problematisation; Islamophobia; Greece; Greek Muslims; Athens; Islam in Greece rel12070485 Academic Editor: Annemarie C. Mayer 1. Introduction According to Göle(2011), mosques in ‘the West’ are no longer mere places of worship Received: 26 May 2021 but instead function as cultural-political constructions that symbolically embody difference Accepted: 26 June 2021 and ‘Otherness’. Accordingly, mosques have become sites of conflict through which the Published: 29 June 2021 symbolic ‘problematisation’ Muslims and Islam is made known. For Allen(2017), this problematisation is further intensified in relation to the building and development of new Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral mosques. As sites of conflict, the discourses of opposition directed at new mosques are with regard to jurisdictional claims in informed by these very same symbolic functions and processes. Such is true of Greece’s published maps and institutional affil- first new ‘official’ mosque since the country was liberated from the Ottoman Empire almost iations. two centuries ago. Located in Athens and having opened its doors for the first time in late 2019, Greece was previously the only European country in which the capital city did not have a state-recognised mosque. A 350-person-capacity building, albeit without any ornate or Islamic features, the city’s new mosque marks the culmination of a long-fought battle. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. With the first attempt to build a mosque dating back to 1890 (Speed 2019)—a century Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. before contemporary debates about the integration of Muslims in Europe began—the This article is an open access article problematisation of mosques as indeed the presence of the religion of Islam and Muslims distributed under the terms and in Greece more generally would seem to have a longer and deeper history of contestation conditions of the Creative Commons than elsewhere in Europe. Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// Investigating the new Athens mosque to build on and develop the existing scholarly creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ literature on the contemporary problematisation of mosques, this article generates new 4.0/). Religions 2021, 12, 485. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12070485 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2021, 12, 485 2 of 17 knowledge by focusing on the Greco-specific context: an amalgam of history, geography, religion and culture, that asymmetrically shape and inform how and why the new Athens mosque is—and indeed continues to be—a site of conflict and opposition. Presenting new empirical data, this article is the first scholarly study to investigate the new Athens mosque since its official opening. In doing so, an innovative and original approach brings together two separate pieces of fieldwork undertaken first-hand by the authors in 2001/2 and 2019/20. Analysing the two sets of data, a threefold thematic structure is employed that focuses on Greece’s history, Christian Orthodoxy and global terrorism. To ensure the findings and analyses are contextualised, this article first explores the existing scholarly canon relating to the contemporary problematisation of mosques before providing a fo- cused overview of Greece’s history, religion and culture appropriate to mosques and in part, Muslims and the religion of Islam. As well as contributing to what is a relatively embryonic body of work this article generates new knowledge and thinking about the new Athens mosque specifically and the Greco-specific social, political, cultural and theological determinants that shape and inform its contestation and opposition. Importantly, this article also makes a timely contribution to the limited academic literature investigating Muslims and Islam in contemporary Greece. 2. Methods and Approaches The approach to the research underpinning this article was fourfold. The first com- prised detailed reviews of the literature relating to the problematisation of mosques in Greece and Europe, historically and contemporarily. Non-specialist resources were also reviewed including those available in the mainstream media and online spaces. The sec- ond comprised a secondary analysis of empirical data gathered by one of the authors as principal investigator of a project funded by the now defunct European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), and its successor, the Fundamental Rights Agency. Gathered while investigating Islamophobia post-9/11 in the then 15 European Union (EU) member nations, the project drew together 75 nationally focused reports—four per member nation—from which a synthesis report was published (Allen and Nielsen 2002). As an EU member nation then and indeed now, a feature of the empirical data gathered in Greece centred on what was at the time a proposed new mosque in Athens. As only the synthesis findings were published, much of the empirical data gathered across the 15 nations were not made publicly available at the time or indeed since. Through revisiting the data from Greece and the mosque specifically, this approach affords a unique opportunity to present findings that are new and original. The third approach analysed primary data gathered by one of the authors while undertaking fieldwork in Greece from January to July 2019. This included interviewing 29 individuals and stakeholders identifying as Muslim, 21 of whom were permanent residents of Athens where the interviews were conducted. The others resided elsewhere in Greece. As with the previous approach, while primarily focusing on Islamophobia in Greece, a significant feature of the data gathered centred on the newly constructed and inaugurated Athens mosque. Both the data and findings are therefore original, not having been published in any format elsewhere. The final approach was to thematically analyse the two datasets. Thematic analysis was preferred due to it being a qualitative method that can be consistently and coherently used across different epistemologies and research questions (Nowell et al. 2017). For Boyatzis(1998), this is especially important when researchers analyse data gathered using different research methods but who wish to communicate with each other across the data. Likewise, Braun and Clarke(2006) and King(2004) also highlighted the value of thematic analysis as an effective method for examining data gathered at different times and in different ways. There are disadvantages to thematic analysis, however. As Nowell et al.(2017) noted, thematic analysis can be afforded less credibility than other qualitative approaches given its potential for inconsistencies due to its inherent flexibility. In seeking to minimise any potential disadvantages or detrimental impacts, the authors acknowledge the observations of Holloway and Todres(2003) and the Religions 2021, 12, 485 3 of 17 need to ensure empirical claims are appropriately evidenced. Doing so, three primary—and importantly, comparative—themes were identified across the two datasets: the role and function of history, the role and function of Christian Orthodoxy, and the perceived threat of terrorism. 3. The Contemporary Problematisation of Mosques in ‘the West’ It was little more than a decade ago that the first scholarly studies investigating the contemporary ‘problematisation’ of the building and construction of mosques in Europe emerged. Spanning different geographical locations, these studies explored problematisa-